Chapter X - Organized Crime and ADL

THE ADL AND ORGANIZED CRIME
CHAPTER X

One of America's foremost experts on organized crime. Hank Messick,
reports that Meyer Lansky, the Russian-born Jewish mobster who was the
Chairman of the Board of the National Crime Syndicate (NCS), had two
dreams s

One was to transform the North American criminal underworld
syndicate into the most powerful business and financial combine in e
world, making big time crime so insulated and so “respectable tn
would be untouchable by any government prosecutors •

The second was to "buy up" Israel and convert it into the world
capitol of his "legitimized" organized crime empire.

Although Lansky died before he saw either dream come true, over tne
past decade since his death, Lansky's twin goals have both become
reality. One of the major vehicle through which the Lansky dreams
became real was the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith.

As we have seen in previous chapters, from its founding at the turn
of the twentieth century, the ADL was first and foremost a defense
agency for the Jewish wing of organized crime. Anytime police or the
press attempted to probe the role of Jewish gangsters in the growing
National Crime Syndicate, the ADL would target them as anti-semites.

One of the clearest indicators of the ADL's successful defense
effort is the fact that the National Crime Syndicate, the most powerful
criminal enterprise in the United States, run for fifty years by Meyer
Lansky, was virtually unheard of. At the peak of Lansky's power, he
maintained an absolute control over the infamous Sicilian Mafia
( "Honored Society" ) , which was just one participating organization in
the National Crime Syndicate.

The National Crime Syndicate, in keeping with Lansky's dream of
"legitimizing" organized crime, was modeled on the National
Reconstruction Administration (NRA) , the Franklin Roosevelt New Deal
agency responsible for oversseing public works projects from coast to
coast. The NCS adopted the NRA' s regional structure, in which decision
making fell on a National Commission equally representing eacl
geographic subdivision. The National Commission structure ain d at
insuring the spread of organized crime into every community ih. /che
country - not just the major cities that had been traditionally hubs of
mob activity: New York, New Orleans, Chicago. It also aimed at

creating a self-policing system that would avert outbreaks of gang
warfare which might bring law enforcement pressure and public outrage
down on the crime syndicate. The Prohibition Era "Capone Wars" in
Chicago had seriously weakened the crime syndicate, and Lansky intended
to insure that no such petty rivalries interfered with his grand scheme

Meyer Lansky was the undisputed Chairman of the Board of the
National Crime Syndicate.

[It is no coincidence that in its own postwar reorganization, the
ADL would adopt the identical structure of the National Crime Syndicate
even calling its governing body the National Commission.]

In return for its services to the Jewish mob, the ADL enjoyed the

financial benefits that go along with fronting for organized crime. ADL
fundraising drives, as well as allied Jewish charities, received floods
of contributions from syndicate allies of the Chairman of the Board,

Meyer Lansky. Although there is no known evidence that Lansky ever
donated to the ADL in his own name, such lifetime syndicate allies as
joe binsey, Victor Posner, Meshulim Riklis, Edmond Safra, Moe Dalitz,

Sam Miller and Morris Shanker gave publicly to the League. In 1985, the
ADL's own monthly <Bulletin> proudly announced on its front page that
the League had awarded syndicate bigshot Moe Dalitz its Philanthropist
of the Year award. Dalitz 's photograph, which had been plastered all
over FBI wanted posters in U.S. Post Offices during the Prohibition
period, accompanied the frontpage tribute to the Cleveland and Las
Vegas-based gangster.

Dalitz was one of the early crime syndicate allies of Meyer Lansky.
He was one of four chieftans of the Cleveland underworld - along with
three other Jewish gangsters: Morris Kleinman, Sam Tucker and Louis

Rothkopf . Following Prohibition, Dalitz became the undisputed boss of
Cleveland, expanding his criminal operations to include gambling clubs
in Miami. One of those night spots, the Frolics Club, was co-owned by
Dalitz and Lansky himself. When Lansky moved into Cuba to open up his
first offshore gambling, narcotics and money laundering haven, Dalitz
was brought in as a privileged partner. When Lansky decided it was
necessary to eliminate one of his earliest syndicate partners, Benjamin
"Bugsy" Siegel from Las Vegas, Dalitz was cut in on a lion's share of
the casinos and related underworld businesses. Right up to Lansky's
final days, Dalitz was an intimate associate and frequent visitor at
Lansky's Miami Beach apartment.

By 1963, at the point that the ADL was ready to abandon its 25 year
joint fundraising enterprise with the rival American Jewish Committee
(AJC), the League assured its financial success by naming as its
national chairman the well-known Hollywood producer Dore Schary. By
this point in time, Meyer Lansky's campaign to sanitize the Jewish
syndicate image had already advanced to the point that it was safe for
the ADL to draw upon Schary 's name in its fundraising appeals.

Schary was known throughout Hollywood as a lifetime friend and
protege of another one of Lansky's top lieutenants, Abner "Longie"
Zwillman, the boss of Atlantic City, New Jersey who was one of the first
members of the National Crime Syndicate to invest heavily in Hollywood.
Zwillman was an original member of Murder, Inc. - the National Crime
Syndicate's assassination squad run personally by Meyer Lansky and
Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel. During the Prohibition Period, Zwillman had
been a member of the "Big Seven," an east coast group of Lansky allies
who controlled the distribution of bootlegged booze, smuggled in from
Canada where it was produced by the Sam Bronfman Gang. After the
elimination of New Jersey mob rivals Irving Wexler ("Waxie" Gordon) and
Arthur Flegenheimer ("Dutch Schultz"), Zwillman took over all syndicate
rackets in the state, eventually expanding his holdings to Las Vegas
gambling casinos and then into the Hollywood motion picture studios
When Zwillman fell ill and threatened to expose Lansky to renewed
government investigations, the syndicate's National Commission agreed
that the New Jersey crime boss should be eliminated. On February 27

tnw' ? w £ llman was found dead in the basement of his twenty room mansion
in West Orange, New Jersey. Local police wrote off his death as a

-suicide but it was widely known that he had been executed by the verv
Murder, E Ppara * us that ^ had helped to found. Y ^

become national chairman of the ADL four years

later, Dore Schary, was widely reported to have attended Zwillman'
funeral, a claim Schary denied.

T* 1 ® fhf e f al 4 -? Ureau investigations was not so sure that Schary was
telling *, In a len gthy background report on Schary written by

the Newark FBI Field Office on August 2, 1961, the following interesting
observat ions were made about both Schary and Zwillman:

. !J e ^v P f P v r cll PP in g dated March 4, 1959 reflects that Dore Schary
denied that he attended the funeral of Abner Zwillman. This clipping
reflects that Schary said he was correcting for the record published
reports that he attended the funeral. Schary in this clipping denied
that he was a close friend of Zwillman and stated he had not seen
Zwillman since thirty years ago at the Newark YM-YWHA, where he was
directing . amateur theatricals . "

Organized crime experts charge that Dore Schary got his start in
Hollywood under the patronage of Zwillman , who was one of the first
National Crime Syndicate commissioners to be given the franchise to
invest Prohibition bootlegging profits in the movie industry.

The FBI report continued:

"On February 26, 1959, [deleted] West Orange, New Jersey Police
Department, advised SA [deleted] that ABNER " LONG IE" ZWILLMAN had
committed suicide by hanging in the basement of his home at 50 Beverly
Road, West Orange, New Jersey, on that date.

"An article in the February 28, 1959 issue of the New York 'World
Telegram, ' a daily New York, New York newspaper, stated that 'Abner
(Longie) Zwillman was the perfect underworld czar - one who wielded
immense power from the shadows . . . Nobody . . . followed so successfully
for so long the approved underworld formula for success — from rags to
rackets to riches to respectability. Longie Zwillman, who headed a $50
million bootlegging ring in Prohibition days, followed the pattern to
perfection and in his later years lived grandly behind theprotective
facade of his 20-room mansion in West Orange - and made angry noises
about suing people who charged he was still a racketeer.

"'Some of the steam went out of the pretense, however, after the
Kefaufer crime probe. Zwillman vanished when investigators wanted words
with him, and when the committee did finally induce him to accept a
subpoena he had to plead the Fifth Amendment against possible
self-incrimination 41 times ... He early found his way into the numbers
racket, and when Prohibition came along he became one of the czars of
the New Jersey rum-running fleet ... He began funneling his millions
into legitimate enterprises . . . and it was not until the Kefaufer
investigation that some of these innocent-appearing fronts were exposed
... He parlayed his ill-gotten millions into statewide power in New
Jersey ... in 1952 the Department of Internal Revenue slapped a $940,000
income tax lien against him, and in 1956, he went on trial for income
tax evasion. He was acquitted. But just this month the Federal Bureau
of Investigation charged that a juror had been bribed and began making
arrests • ' M

The " appointment of Dore Schary as national chairman of the ADL, a
post he held from 1963-1969, was symbolic. The Jewish syndicate was
ready to go public, and it would no longer be necessary for the ADL to

conceal its longstanding deep crime links.

One of the oldest and strongest ties between the League and the
National Crime Syndicate centered around one of the mob's favorite New
york City banks, the Sterling National Bank. According to accounts by
organized crime specialists. Sterling National was founded in 1929 by
one of Meyer Lansky's closest syndicate associates, Frank Erickson.
Erickson was one of Lansky's chief money handlers. After the November
1926 assassination of Arnold Rothstein, the predecessor to Lansky as the
"Brains’ or the Jewish mob, Lansky personally arranged for Erickson to
take oyer the management of the syndicate's nationwide bookmaking
operations. Erickson was Lansky's money handler in several major
business ventures including Lansky's hidden ownership of racetracks in
Florida and casinos in Nevada, according to Lansky biographer Hank

Sterling National Bank was also the syndicate's "factor” bank in the
New York garment center - doling out high interest short term loans

to enable the thousands of small clothing manufacturers to purchase raw
materials. The loans were collateralized by the garment companies'
accounts-receivable. it was a quasi-legalized form of loan sharking.
Erickson's relationship to Meyer Lansky gave Sterling National virtually
unchallenged control over the garment center.

In 1934, Theodore H. Silbert joined the bank. By 1945, he was
President. Under Silbert, Sterling National was restructured in 1966,
becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Standard Financial Corporation,
which in turn was wholly owned by Sterling Bancorp, a holding company
whose shares were sold on the New York Stock Exchange. Silbert was the
chairman, director and chief executive officer of all three
corporations .

Silbert was also a lifelong member of the Anti-Defamation League,
serving on the National Commission and the National Executive Committee
as the ADL's Treasurer, and directing ADL's fundraising drive, the ADL
Appeal (to which mobster Moe Dalitz and many other Lansky frontmen
contributed). Silbert is today an Honorary Vice Chairman of the ADL.

Sterling National Bank is the ADL's bank. According to ADL
financial records on file with the Internal Revenue Service, up through
1976, Sterling National Bank and Standard Financial Corporation were the
only outside institutions in which the ADL made any investments (the
only exception being a $5,000 one time investment in the American Bank
and Trust Company, headed by ADL National Commissioner and one-time
B'nai Brith International President Phillip Klutznick). The ADL
Appeal's bank account was at Sterling. After 1978, the ADL transferred
all of its banking and investment activities - including the ADL
Foundation - to Sterling National Bank, according to several sources in
the financial community familiar with the League's activities.

Although Silbert was apparently installed as Sterling's chief
financial officer to conceal the bank's links to the National Crime
Syndicate, the ADL fundraiser did not do a very good job of insulatina
the bank from charges of crime ties. y

As of 1982, Sterling National Bank and its associated bank holdino
companies, were the targets of three civil suits, all charging that the
bank had engaged in fraud and theft conspiracies. The charges leveled
against Sterling National Bank were identical to the more recent
criminal charges successfully brought against ADL linked junk bond

■tfindlers ant i inside traders Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken.

* in 1979, Daniel Meister sued Sterling National Bank, Standard
Factors, Brooke and Taylor, Reed and Dunmore, Bernard Spector and Marvin
Lilerman in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New
york. The case number was 79 CIV 3040. Meister charged that Tallerman
had looted his own company, Latin American Resources, in collusion with
Sterling National Bank, in order to defraud investors. The modus
operandi of the theft is suggestive of how Sterling "washes” illegal
funds into the ADL.

Tallerman converted $880,000 of his company's assets into a letter
of credit which was issued to a dummy company in New Jersey which he
owned. Sterling National Bank funneled the money into a series of
offshore bank accounts in Panama and Switzerland. Tallerman defaulted
on the loans to his own company and made off with the cash - courtesy of
Sterling's offshore laundering skills. Tallerman pled guilty to
criminal charges, in addition to the civil suit, which named Sterling
National Banks' chief of factoring, Jordan Posh, as a co-conspirator.

* In a similar scheme several years earlier. Sterling was charged
in another civil law suit in federal court with conspiring with a number
of other banks to conceal a publicly traded company's insolvency in
order to loot the public by soliciting investments in a company that was
already bankrupt. In 1976, David Haber initiated a class action suit
against Jerome, Norman and Raphael Dansker, the owners of Investors
Funding Corporation. IFC, founded in 1946, was driven into bankrupcy in
1974, at which point Sterling, along with Israel Discount Bank, Barclays
Bank and a number of other corporations, continued to peddle IFC stock
and divert these funds into hidden accounts - fully knowing that the
company had gone under.

The biggest bank fraud scandal involving Sterling played out in the
early 1980s, amid a backdrop of international terrorism. In December
1981, terrorists from the Italian Red Brigades kidnapped General James
Dozier, the commander of NATO forces in Italy. In a radical departure
from the normal hostage rescue methods, the Italian government began an
across-the-board crackdown on Mafia operations throughout Italy and
Sicily, even attacking known mob financial operations in New York City.
The theory behind the rescue effort was that the crime syndicate would
help the Italians and Americans free General Dozier in order to get the
government to ease up on the pressure, which was costing the syndicate
billions of dollars and jeopardizing their infrastructure. The Italian
government had by this point figured out that the terrorist
infrastructure inside the country was tied to more traditional criminal
underworld networks, obtaining weapons, safehouses and phony
identification papers from the mob in return for aiding in the smuggling
of illegal narcotics and the carrying out of kidnappings.

This radical approach to dealing with terrorism - literally forcing
organized crime to aid the government rescue effort - did eventually
lead to the freeing of General Dozier and the apprehension of the Red
Brigade kidnappers.

In the process of the operation, a curious thing happened which had
major implications for the ADL and its own links to organized crime. On
January 29, 1982, the Italian government, acting through Adolfo
Dolmetta, Giovanni Rubboli and Vittorio Coda, filed a civil suit in the
Federal District Court of the Southern District of New York charging

**tructive trust, conspiracy to defraud, fraud and breach of
27 a, clary duty." Named among the defendants were Sterling Bancorp,
irfndard Prudential Corporation (formerly Financial Corporation) and
furling National Bank and Trust Company of New York. The plaintiffs
ore Italian government-appointed liquidators of the Banca Privata
rraliana, S.p.A. They charged that Sterling National had participated
7 n a n international money laundering scheme to help Italian banker
Michele Sindona steal $27 million in deposits from Banca Privata and
another Milan bank, Banca Unione duirng 1973-74.

According to the civil complaint filed in the Southern District
court, "BPI was ordered into liquidation by the Italian Ministry of the
Treasury on or about September 27, 1974. The initial liquidator or bpi,
Giorgio Ambrosoli, was murdered in July 1979. In or about July 1981, a
warrant of arrest for the murder of Ambrosoli was issued against Sindona
by the Inquiring Judge of Milan, in the framework of the penal
proceeding commenced in Milan in or about 1980 against Sindona and

Following the Ambrosoli assassination, the three plaintiffs were
appointed as the Banca Privata liquidators. The January 1981 suit
against Sterling National Bank was part of the Mafia crackdown operation
initiated by the Italian authorities to force the syndicate's
cooperation in the rescue of General Dozier. Sindona was later linked
to the Propaganda Due Freemasonic Lodge, a crime-tainted grouping
implicated in the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II in May

1981 .

Sterling National Bank was charged in the civil suit with helping
Sindona to steal $27,180,000 in BPI and Banca Unione deposits through an
elaborate money laundering scheme involving dummy companies in
Switzerland, Luxembourg, Utah and Deleware. The theft scheme was
triggered by the collapse of Franklin National Bank, a Long Island, New
York bank in which Sindona was heavily invested. To cover his pending
losses in the Franklin failure, Sindona apparently began looting funds
on deposit in other banks that he controlled. Among the co-defendants
with Sindona and Sterling National was the former Nixon Administration
Secretary of the Treasury, David Kennedy, a business partner of Sindona
at the time of the Franklin National collapse. Sterling helped Sindona
conceal the stolen funds by mediating the purchase of stock in a New
York City factoring company, Talcott National Company - a move that
Sterling concealed from the Federal Reserve Board in violation of U.S.
law. Sterling then "loaned" Sindona $2.7 million. The loan was
collateralized by Sindona turning over the Talcott stock to Sterling,
which Sterling later "sold" to David Kennedy - with funds provided by
Sterling National Bank. The elaborate shell game enabled Sindona to
conceal - for a period of time — the theft.

The Banca Privata scam was a classic operation right out of the pages
of Meyer Lansky's organized crime handbook. Sterling's expertise was
not Burprising. Its board of directors included several experts in
financial magic - including at least two men who would go on to assume
prominent positions in the Reagan-Bush administration. Both men were
also major backers of the Anti-Defamation League*

* Maxwell Rabb, the Vice Chairman of the powerful New York State
ADL and a Sterling National Bank director, became the Ambassador to
Italy under President Ronald Reagan. Rabb maintained close ties to the

tig Jewish mob attorney Roy Marcus Cohn throughout his d
ting in Rome - R *bb's daughter, although an Mierican citizen, wa ^
^financial advisor to the government of San Marino , a t Y

Italian border which was run by the Italian Communx countrv in

th f or ious for having the loosest banking regulations of Y fY

?he free world. Rabb had been a key ADL politico dating back to^he ^
Time of the Eisenhower Administration, when he was Cabin eXDO sed in

tS President. Despite these political credentials, Rabb was exposed rn
the New York City press in the 1970s as a business part rDort Hotels
Lansky. Rabb and Lansky jointly setup the Internationa P placed

Corporation. It was one of those rare instances in which
his P own name on a corporate board of directors list. N official of

he chose to take such a bold move in partnership with a p

the Antx— Def amation League. ^ e . ^rin National Ban)c

* The other ADL-Reaganite on the board of Sterling . . ^ o ea aan to

was Arnold Burns. In 1985, Burns was appointed by powerful

the post of Deputy Attorney General, making him nized crime

federal prosecutor. Burns, like Rabb, had fignifican structured a
ties. Through his law firm, Burns and Summit, Burns had 8 ^ctured^a^

tax evasion scheme in which clients made false claims technology

off shore tax shelters that were to provide capital to high technology
firms in Israel. Under an incredible loophole in the U.S . federal
codes, engineered by Zionist Lobby figures in the United States
Congress, investments in Israeli research and development firms were
exempted from American taxes. ^

According to news accounts and federal government inves^gators.

Burns and Summit never passed the funds onto the Israeli firms. T Y
merelv held the investors' money offshore in secret bank accounts in the
Bahamas - permitting the investors to claim millions of dollars in tax
write-offs. According to at least one news account of the scandal, one
of the Israeli attorneys who conspired with Burns was Howard Katz, a
former Boston, Massachusetts-based lawyer who was heavily involved in
th^Jonathan Jay Pollard spy scandal. Katz handled the secret Israeli
spy accounts S?ough which payments to Pollard were passed. Katz
persponally purchased the condominium apartment in Washington, D.C.
where Pollard would deliver secret American government documents to

Israeli embassy officials. .... .

Despite the fact that all this damning evidence came out publicly,
Arnold Burns was never prosecuted. In a sealed arrangement with federal
prosecutors^ SurnS testified in court agatnet several of hie clients and
business partners, who eventually went to jail, while Burns went on to
become Deputy Attorney General of the United States . .

In that capacity as Deputy Attorney General, Burns played a key
insider role in the looting of a Washington computer software firm.
Inslaw which had been slated to receive a one billion dollar contract
from the Department of Justice to install and manage an integrated
computer case management system. Burns and others, according to U.S.
federal court records, intentionally bankrupted Inslaw by withholding
millions of dollars in Justice Department payments to the company, as
part of a scheme to take over the software contract. According to a
U.S. Senate investigative report on the Inslaw bankrupcy, Burns
personally intervened with the law firm representing Inslaw to sabotage
the company's case against the Justice Department. Evidence suggests

Burns was working on behalf of Charles Allen and Company , a
^linked Wall Street investment house which was financing the rival
'nfflpa n y slateci to receive the Justice Department contract. Allen and
u were Mever ™ ~ i « * ^ vn*o iq^Oc mmro -f-o

Comp an Y were Me Y er Lansky's main financiers in his 1960s move to
estahli sh a casino gambling and narcotics smuggling empire on the
Caribbean Bahamas Islands. Computer industry specialists confirm that
t he company servicing the Justice Department computers would have
re al-tim© access to the entire federal government criminal justice data
base/ including such sensitive information as grand jury testimony, the
identities of federal undercover agents and federally protected
witnesses, and pending indictments. The Inslaw scandal is still the
subject of federal court cases and at least one congressional
investigation.

If corrupt bankers were one key to Meyer Lansky's scheme to
legitimize the National Crime Syndicate, the second cornerstone of his
grand dream was corrupt lawyers. Once again, the Anti— Defamation League
would provide the key personnel.

No single person epitomizes the central role of the ADL in the
Lansky grand design more than Kenneth Bialkin. Like Dore Schary,

Bialkin. was . a symbol of the Anti-Defamation League's marriage with the
mob. Bialkin, one of Wall Street's most powerful and wealthy lawyers,
was the National Chairman of the ADL from 1982-86. In 1984, he also
became the President of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish
Organizations. He was the President of the Jerusalem Foundation, a
prestigious and explicitly Freemasonic group headed by the Holy City's
longtime Mayor Teddy Kolleck. Today, Bialkin is the Honorary Chairman
of the ADL and the President of the ADL Foundation, the League's major
current financial arm (housed at Sterling National Bank). Up until he
moved to the world's largest law firm, Scadden Arps, several years ago,
Bialkin was one of two senior managing partners of the Wall Street firm
of Willkie, Farr and Gallagher. Throughout his years with Willkie Farr,
the firm handled many of ADL's legal affairs - always on a "pro-bono"
(free of charge) basis.

Attorney Kenneth Bialkin was also the brains behind narcotics
trafficker and international fugitive-thief Robert Vesco, according to
federal court records in the Southern District of New York.

To understand the complex $270 million looting of Investors Overseas
Service by Robert Vesco, Willkie Farr and Gallagher, and several other
top ADL linked figures, it is necessary to provide a brief profile of
the IOS money laundering scheme, first established during the 1960s by a
Rothschild family front man named Bernie Cornfeld.

A former organizer in New York City for the Socialist Party USA,
Bernie Cornfeld showed up in Geneva, Switzerland in the early 1960s with
a startup fund provided by the French branch of the Rothschild family.

He rapidly established a complex network of companies, including IOS and
the Fund of Funds, ostensibly to manage portfolios of mutual funds on
behalf of a large clientel of small and medium size investors from all
parts of the world. Because all of the Cornfeld companies were
incorporated in Switzerland, where bank secrecy laws protect the
identities of all investors and depositors, from the outset the
companies became a haven for organized crime profits - especially those
of National Crime Syndicate boss Meyer Lansky.

Author Hank Messick described the Cornf ield-IOS relationship to

f a& follows:

Concurrent with the spread of casinos in the Bahamas was another
JF^pment of vast significance. Public-owned corporations invaded the
•Sbling Held as the final refinement of Lansky's master plan...

9 "playing an important role behind the scenes was the grant Investors
mrerseas Service, the parent company of a host of subsidiaries holding
flome $2 billion in mutual funds. Based in Switzerland, and not subject
to regulation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, IOS operated
around the world. It bought stock for its anonymous customers from tne
public corporations owning the casinos, and there was no way to tell ir
the purchaser was Meyer Lansky or Henry Ford II. . _ _ aW , 11+

"The 1970 trial of Alvin Malnik put on record much information about
the gangster-dominated Bank of World Commerce in Nassau, and the
International Credit Bank of Switzerland headed by Tibor Rosenbaum.
Literally millions passed back and forth between the tw ° kanks a
reinvested in the United States . Connections between IOS and tn
International Credit Bankwere more obscure but nonetheless reai * *

"Rernie Cornfeld, the founder and until 1970 the guiding geni
IOS/ was a close friend and business associate of Tibor Rosenbaum. +
and the International Credit Bank, for example, jointly loaned mo Y
an English-language newspaper in Geneva, which was later taken Y

IOS •

"Even more to the point was Cornfeld 's use of Sylvain Ferdman. An
official of the International Credit Bank, Ferdman was identified oy
Life magazine in 1967 as a courier for Meyer Lansky. He was also a
close friend and associate of Malnik and the Bank of World ^omme •

When IOS encountered difficulties in Brazil, Cornfeld sent Ferdman t
that country to pick up the pieces. A front from a philanthropic agency
was provided, but Ferdman was in reality a secret agent. . .

"The International Credit Bank eventually set up a branch office in
Nassau to expedite the flow of money and eliminate the need for
couriers. With such facilities easily available - and many IOS
companies were based in Nassau - money could disappear into IOS and
r6dDD6&r anywhere as a loan or investment • ...

P "0ne such investment by a subsidiary of IOS showed up in
'Lanskvland, ' the area just east of Gulfstream Park. It was a
$40,000,000 high-rise apartment complex, and who the real owners were no

° ne ^A U lot^of W Resorts International stock was purchased by IOS, for
example and Resorts officials became annoyed when suggestions were made
that the buvs were made on behalf of Lansky. The irony of it was,
however, that Resorts could no more disprove the charges than officials

COUl » B ? r mIans t of the international financial structure, machinery
existed S conceal the holdings of Lansky or any other member of
organized crime. To all intents and purposes, they had become

lnVi One^s ide-bene fit of the invisibility was that front men, such as
Cornfeld, could be eliminated and replaced without having to resort to
the earlier syndicate liquidation methods perfected Jansky s°vn
Murder, Inc. Now, personnel retirements became the work of Wall Street
law firms and hioh priced accountants •

A^clSdiSg to federal court records, Kenneth Bialkin and Willkie Farr

gallagher handled the ouster of Cornfeld from IOS. His replacement
a Detroit-born salesman who had been at one time employed by an
Central Intelligence Agency front company called All-American
Engineering, itself a wholly owned subsidiary of the

Delaware-headquartered DuPont Chemical Company. His name was Robert

ye SCO.

A careful review of court records and other published sources
reveals that Vesco was a designated front-man for a group of
Anti-Defamation League operators. According to court testimony by
Kenneth Bialkin in a 1974 class action suit brought by defrauded #
investors in Fund of Funds, Willkie Farr and Gallagher had done business
with Vesco years before they aided him from behind the scenes m his
takeover and eventual looting of IOS.

In a 1971 meeting in London, England, Willkie Farr attorneys
introduced Vesco to a wealthy Jewish mobster named Meshulam Rikiis.
During the war for Israeli independence, Rikiis had fled Palestine
because he was discovered to be a police informant for the British
authorities and was sentenced to death by the Irgun, one of the

underground groups. Rikiis eventually wound up in Minneapolis,

Minnesota, where he was picked up by Burton Joseph, one of the top
officials of the Anti-Defamation League and an ally of the local gram
cartels. Joseph was the National Chairman of the ADL from 1977-80,

With startup money from Joseph, Rikiis took over one of the flagship
liquor companies to emerge from the Prohibition bootlegging organization
of Meyer Lansky and the National Crime Syndicate, Schenleys
Distilleries. Schenleys had been established by Lewis Rosensteil, a
longtime friend of Lansky, Johnny Torrio and Joseph Linsey. Torrio, an
early syndicate patron of Lansky, was a dominant shareholder in a
Schenleys affiliated company, Prendergast and Davies Company, Limited,
run by Rosensteil' s brother-in-law Herbert Heller. Rosensteil was
another shining example of how the National Crime Syndicate established
respectability and social standing. Not only was Rosensteil a bigtime
donor to the ADL. He was one of the largest contributors to the
University of Miami endowment, and was also the founder of the J. Edgar
Hoover Foundation, established in honor of his longtime friend, FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover. The Foundation was established with stock in
Schenleys Distillers. When he retired as Hoover's longtime deputy at
the FBI, Louis Nichols became Vice President of Schenleys.

The company was an ideal front for Rikiis and the Minneapolis ADL
crowd behind him. Rikiis bought heavily into IOS, to the point that, by
the time of the London meeting with Vesco, Rikiis held a controlling
interest in the mutual fund empire.

The ouster of Cornfeld and his replacement by Vesco was greatly
facilitated by the fact that at least three partners in Willkie Farr all
sat on the boards of IOS companies - Allan Conwill, John D'Alimonte and
Raymond Merrit. The three reported to managing partner Bialkin.

In 1971, Rikiis transferred his controlling interests in IOS to
Robert Vesco. Vesco immediately moved to oust Cornfeld from the
directorship of the companies.

Shortly after the Vesco takeover, in early 1972, Willkie Farr
attorney Alan Conwill sold off most of the assets of an IOS subsidiary
called FOF Proprietary Funds for $60 million. During August 1972, those

•fleas development Bank Sfe ^f d v 0 ,? Luxe ^ our 9 she ll company called
r f?eive the $60 mini ' The she11 was setup by Wxllkie Farr solely
the Bank of New York 1011 stolen from the FOF Proprietary Funds account
at front estahl icVvf^V The £unds were transferred shortly to another
Adoration droi d by will *ie Farr called Inter-Americln
fhf P monev was waqhoH^ Purchase of worthless stock in Inter-American,
dffl? special W t? t0 the Phoenix Bank of the Bahamas, another
? Eventual T-u- <-h ab i^ Sbed ^ or the occasion by Willkie Farr lawyer Jay

^ ua t thS 560 mi Hion arrived in Costa Rica just as the
Thlalal , Ending there as well,

million Tnc^? ra i lel P r °cess, Vesco additionally walked away with $210
apn ,mni afoH f ^nds. It: widely believed that those funds were the

j . h . voo^ aU u d 5 reci P rofits of the Meyer Lanksy crime organization,

S °^ ha 2r“ erel y transferred the money into a new,

Tnc • ?f fshore banking apparatus, replacing the Swiss centered

ZT* • 8 atflllate d International Credit Bank of Tibor Rosenbaum,

rne precise route by which the $210 million was lifted from IOS is not
Known, Decause no effort was ever made by the "investors" to sue Vesco,
Bialkin or others to recover the loss. That fact alone constitutes the
strongest circumstantial evidence that the Vesco-Bialkin looting of IOS
was part of a major then-ongoing restructuring of North American
organized crime. ^ Lansky was moving the center of world dirty money
laundering from its former capital in the mountains of Switzerland to
his newly expanded Caribbean gambling and hot money empire.

At a point after Vesco landed in Costa Rica, the Willkie Farr
frontman, still working through Bialkin and company, attempted to buy
out Resorts International, the Bahamas-headquartered casino resort setup
years earlier by Lansky. The deal never went through, despite a string
of meetings between Vesco attorneys and lawyers representing the resort.

Once again, top ADL officials were lurking in the shadows of the deal.
Representing unnamed parties in the negotiations was the Wall Street law
firm of Fried Frank Harris Schriever and Kampelman. Senior partner Max
Kampelman, today an Honorary Vice Chairman of the ADL and one of its
most active National Commissioners for decades, was a member of the
"Minneapolis Mafia" along with Burton Joseph that setup Riklis and Vesco
in business.

One possible explanation for the failure of the Vesco takeover of
the Resorts International operation in Paradise Island, Bahamas is the
fact that a class action suit filed in July 1974 in the Federal District
Court for the Southern District of New York (74CIV80) threatened to
unravel the complex scheme through which the $60 million piece of IOS
had been lifted by the future National Chairman of the ADL. The suit,
<The Stockholders of Fund of Funds, Investors Overseas Service, Inc.
versus Robert Vesco, Alan Conwill, The Bank of New York and Willkie Farr
and Gallagher>, would go on for six years and would ultimately result in
a jury verdict against the defendants and a court ordered payment of $60
million by the Bank of New York and Bialkin 's law firm Willkie Farr.

On July 31, 1980, Federal Judge D.J. Stewart ordered the Bank of New
York to pay the defrauded IOS investors a total of $35.6 million and
ordered Willkie Farr and Gallagher to pay the remaining $24.4 million.

The public court files of the suit fill twenty boxes. They contain
extensive correspondence, depositions and other documents showing the
guiding hand of Kenneth Bialkin and Willkie Farr in the Vesco looting

|gJ C nar^tics t ?rade? Uld place him at the ver Y center of the world

financial wizard^buying^lavf^^ Vesco cut the ima 9 e of a rogue
Irina ud everv 1 ooq£ ^ . avisl1 wa lled estate in Costa Rica, blatantly
woSld IhStle h? m POl i tician on the island, and purchasing a yacht
Caribbean After ? nd famil y a nd business associates around the

ufvon^ 1972 re^L^" neling a . large illegal contribution into Richard
I navoffs to the itnc t n° n cam P a ign, Vesco made similar covert financial
If ff^ina his iJ?7L PreSidential campaign of Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Caribbean exiled laence with the new administration (albeit from distant
1 thaf k ' Vesco next attempted to unfreeze a fleet of Boeing

J? een Purchased by Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, by
«« ?han 9 M '?i ' Uy Up the President's brother, Billy Carter. Billy was

cooperate with Vesco and Qaddafi. When the
Biiiygate story hit the newspapers on the eve of Jimmy Carter's 1980
reeiection campaign, it practically sealed the incumbent's defeat.

with each successive scandal, Vesco 's name became more and more
synonymous with rogue financial dealings. And with each successive
scandal, Vesco 's ties to the Anti-Defamation League bigshots Bialkin,
Joseph, Riklis, Kampelman, etc. became more invisible.

In effect, the ADL set up their front-man Vesco to draw the
attention away from their ongoing involvement in Lansky's grand scheme -
in much the same way that Lansky had himself built up a wall of
insulation against public exposure.

Publicly distanced from his ADL controllers, Vesco, by 1979, was
paving the way for the biggest narcotics bonanza in the history of North
America. In partnership with a small-time Colombian hoodlum who had
served a half dozen years in a Florida jail for car theft and marijuana
smuggling named Carlos Lehder Rivas, Robert Vesco purchased the Bahamian
island of Norman's Cay. For the next three years, Norman's Cay served
as the major transshipment point for the flow of Colombian cocaine in to
the United States. The unlikely business partnership between the ADL's
syndicate frontman Vesco and the Colombian hoodlum who openly proclaimed
his admiration for Adolph Hitler was a strategic move. Lehder 's family
back in Colombia was closely tied to the leading Medellin crime families
who had built up a fortune through emerald smuggling, and were now in
the process of financing a massive expansion of coca production in
Bolivia and Peru, which would be processed and transported up to the
United States via secret laboratories and clandestine airstrips in
Colombia. The Vesco-Lehder partnership blossomed into what is now known
as the Medellin Cartel.

Although popularized accounts portray the Medellin Cartel as a
Colombian phenomenon which has supplanted traditional North American
criminal organizations in the narcotics business, the truth is quite to
the contrary. As part of Meyer Lansky's wholesale move into the Western
Hemisphere, a move greatly facilitated by new banking deregulation laws
passed during the Carter administration, the Republic of Panama and the
Caribbean islands became overnight the new haven for dirty money. And
the Lansky- ADL apparatus was already there on the ground to run the show
from behind the scenes. It would be through this elaborate offshore
money laundering apparatus that the old Lansky organization would retain
choke-point control over the Medellin and other South American cocaine

rTA

/l a while the Colombians oi-skk^^ ..v ^

•Jwrtlon - including the urJmlSS?

Drominonf “6 a alines , the Lansky

Prominent ADL figures - would rake ii

to

in the

Ant i— De famation Leacrue <?nnnAv 4 - _
administration's special neqotiai-n?** Sol Linowitz was the Carter
Linowitz ran the negotiations wit^ r f ° r the Panama Canal Treaty.
open up the Panama banks to offch^ °ne overriding objective in mind:
disinterested party As * h ? ff shore dirty money. Linowitz was no

correspondent bank^f the Nat?nna? r n° f v Ma ? ine Midland Bank ' the
nersonallv at the National Bank of Panama, Linowitz was

Sdst“f thJ PanLS the hot mone y circuit! In 1978, in the

Bank was purchased k< a J?K^ Treat Y negotiations, Linowitz 's Marine Midland
the most notorfnS d Y the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation,
time of the n^?! d f? g mone Y laundering facility in the world since the
time of the nineteenth century Opium Wars in China.

n ftn an 73 « this entire period of buildup for the "Cocaine

,T^ a ^ Z f^°Ar,r he £ i? 8 ? S/ the Carter Administration ' s Secretary of Commerce
AD ^ official, Phillip Klutznik. According to the ADL's
OX ^ 1 S ia ’ L or . history, "Not The Work Of A Day," the Carter White House
aa ?i, D n m0 ? ratlC Part y National Chairman Robert Strauss consulted directly
W1 tn Burton Joseph, a longtime friend of Vice President Walter Mondale,
on the selection of Klutznik as Commerce Secretary. The same Burton
Joseph, then serving as the National Chairman of the ADL, had been the
"match-maker" between Riklis and Vesco.

To this day, U.S. government prosecutors consider Robert Vesco a
kingpin of the cocaine trade.

After fleeing Costa Rica in 1981 to avoid arrest by American drug
enforcement agents, Vesco eventually obtained permission from Cuban
dictator Fidel Castro to set up houskeeping in Havana. The invitation
must have greatly amused Meyer Lansky, whose longstanding dream of
building up a casino empire in Cuba had been dashed when Castro siezed
power from Lansky's longtime friend Fulgencio Batista.

Among the services that Vesco provided to the Cuban communist
dictator in return for the hospitality was to cut Castro into the drug
smuggling business that he had built up in partnership with Lehder. Not
that Castro particularly needed the American's help. From no later than
the early 1960s, Castro had been guided by Soviet Bloc intelligence
services to get in on the drug trade. Communist guerilla bands in
Colombia, Peru and Central America had learned to finance their arms
purchases by dealing with the drug traffickers. Leftist guerillas would
guard coca and marijuana plantations, in some instances actually growing
and processing the drugs themselves, and in other instances providing
armed convoys for the traffickers as they shipped the unprocessed
cocaine base to the laboratories.

Vesco, however, provided the Cubans and their Sandinista allies in
nearby Nicaragua with a direct entre to the main smuggling routes
through the Caribbean. Through Vesco 's intermediation, the Cubans and
Nicaraguans were soon providing refueling and other transshipment
services to the Medellin Cartel - earning millions of dollars in hard
currency while hastening the cultural and moral demise of the "Yankees."

On April 17, 1989, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that a
grand jury indictment had been handed down against Robert Vesco,
charging him with cocaine smuggling. The press release accompanying the
indictment stated in part:

!

W* w. Genzaaan , United States

P^ida, announces today the indictm^n? rn ? y 4- for Middle District
l ?*traxtd j ur y in Jacksonville Fln-ri^ nt .°^ two additional defendants
w tsUm of cocaxne from Colombia ai ? investigation of the

^"'tfedeliin Cartel, Charged with nto United States by members of
f t ^d States was Robert Lee C °^?? lrin ?- to im P°rt cocaine into the

[ states was Kooert Lee Vesrn import cocaine into t

was named as a part of a . Vesco f 55, currently residing in

; hlch functioned from 1974 tK^^ C °v S ?i‘ racy involving 30 other defendants
alleges that Vesco assisted T 1999 ' The indictment specifically

of the Xedellin Cartel in = S a f . Le £ der f formerly one of the leaders
cocaine over Cuba in late low % ln L for the P assa 9 e of planes carrying
life imprisonment after havi^'v. Lehder is now serving a sentence of
Jacksonville, Florida in lift ft 9 b ?? n con Y lcted of cocaine smuggling at
iMiiam i penalty of life i m . • " ^ convicted, Vesco could receive a

•Vesco r^Ltu im P^isonment and a $4,000,000 fine...

defendants C rJ a ?? e< ^ dn a superceding indictment that names 30

■SSS22GJS?^ X 2 g , Pabl ° Escobar-Gaviria, Jose Gonzalo
Carte 1° „w.», ' and Jorge Ochoa-Vasquez , all members of the Medellin

f i' !S Ch Was returne d in February, 1989."
r. = ^Kf^_j[r L “ 9 - t0 the ind ictment, in May 1984, Carlos Lehder, Pablo
5 - ^“ G ^I Xr J a * Jor S e Ochoa-Vasquez, Fabio Ochoa-Vasquez and Gonzalo
. , we f e a il operating out of Nicaragua, where they fled
xmmeaxateiy following the assassination of Colombia's Justice Minister
Rodrigo Lara Bonilla by a Medellin Cartel assassination squad,
iiirougn a large payoff to Sandinista officials, the five Medellin Cartel
Losses had arranged to shift their smuggling operations to the Central
American country, and had already stashed 1,400 kilograms (nearly 3,000
pounds) of cocaine at a hangar at Los Brasiles Air Base.

In October 1984, Lehder sent a courier from Corn Island, Nicaragua
to Cayo Largo, Cuba carrying a letter to Robert Vesco asking his old
smuggling partner to arrange with Cuban authorities for Medellin Cartel
planes carrying cocaine from Nicaragua to Andros Island in the Bahamas
to pass over Cuban air space. Within days, Vesco had obtained approval
from the Cuban authorities for the overflights.

Back in Washington, D.C. a senior official of the Latin American
Department of the Anti-Defamation League, Rabbi Morton Rosenthal, was
being ushered into the White House to deliver a background briefing to
the President on the Sandinista government's anti-semitism. ADL pledged
to help the Reagan Administration in its secret war to overthrow the
anti-semitic Sandinista regime in Managua. The Medellin Cartel also
reportedly pledged its support to the Reagan effort. As a part of the
anti-Sandinista effort, bankers for the Medellin Cartel would covertly
provide pilots, aircraft and millions of dollars in cash to the Reagan
administration 9 s secret war.

Meyer Lansky and his ADL compatriots had learned long ago to hedge
their bets and always invest in both sides in every conflict, whether an
electoral campaign or a war.

Ironically, Kenneth Bialkin's prize client Robert Vesco was basking
in the Cuban sun aboard a yacht, which he had purchased from his
longtime friend, Arab billionaire Adnan Khossoghi. At the same time,
Bialkin was personally representing Khossoghi in a series of secret
financial transactions that provided the Reagan administration's Secret
Team (Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and retired Air Force
General Richard Secord) with tens of millions of dollars to purchase

< 0 bank account in Switzerland 3 ?^ f ° r v, th ? • Nicara U uan Contras .
w * eCr tgd by a Zurich-based »-n-f land ttlrou 9h which the funds passed
^ fla9 r,,rnnp a n ?? • att °rney named Willard Zucker. Zucker had

European representative of Willkie Farr and Salter and°had
^ e co Bialkin s closest collaborators in the IOS takeover by

iv^^was^activei'v above-described events were unfolding, Kenneth
Bialkin was actively serving as the National Chairman of the
Anti -Defamation League.

„ COm ? and 9°/ wars end, but the longterm goal of

Meyer Lansky to bring the National Crime Syndicate into the forefront of
American business and politics remained as a constant.

Beginning m the mid-1980s, Kenneth Bialkin was already involved in
the next phase of the Lansky grand scheme. He was working to put
5???. er e laborate financial infrastructure through which the
billions °i dollars in annual profit from underworld activity could be
repatriated back into the United States.

Just as he helped pioneer Robert Vesco's shifting of the Lansky
fortune to offshore banking havens in the Caribbean, Bialkin would now
orchestrate a string of dramatic corporate takeovers and mergers through
which ownership of a vast chunk of corporate America would fall into the
hands of the heirs of the National Crime Syndicate.

While still operating at Willkie Farr and Gallagher, Bialkin
arranged the merger of American Express Corporation with several other
Willkie Farr clients, including Shearson Loeb Rhodes and Safra Bank of

Edmond Safra. Shortly after the AmEx-Shearson merger, federal

investigators discovered that the credit card and merchant banking
conglomerate was involved in a multi-million dollar check kiting scheme
on behalf of organized crime. American Express offices in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania and Paris, France were raided by U.S. Customs and Federal
Bureau of Investigation agents, top officials were indicted.

A far more serious link between the Bialkin clients and
international criminal enterprises was surpressed before any indictments
could be handed down. That case involved Edmond Safra, a Bialkin client
and leading ADL backer who owned Republic National Bank in New York
City, as well as a string of banks in Switzerland and Brazil.

In 1988, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Customs
officials operating out of the Berne, Switzerland American embassy,
discovered that a Zurich based company, Shakarchi Trading Company, was
serving as a money laundering channel for both Middle Eastern and Latin
American drug running networks. The Berne-based investigators tracked
shipments of gold and cash garnered from hashish and opium trade from
Lebanon through Turkey and Bulgaria into Zurich, where couriers from
Shakarchi picked up the items. The gold was sold and the proceeds,
along with the cash shipments were wired into an account at the Republic
National Bank in New York City.

Simultaneously, DEA investigators working on "Operation Polar Cap,"
a probe of Los Angeles, California based money laundering fronts
servicing the Medellin Cartel, discovered that cocaine profits were
being wired from Los Angeles into the same numbered bank account at
Republic National Bank. A firm link had been established between two
apparently independent drug trafficking organizations* both were being
serviced by the same money washing outfit, Shakarchi Trading Company.

Z African investigators in q wi * ,

'^o r f h iifetime V fwL^ h ^ , the firm*?* foil nHo»> probing the background

5

a lifetime friend firm 's founder Mohs rxg , the b ^ckgro\

Republic National lank US i£ ess a ssociat4 2? IZql S ^ archi £

lerx k ng C strSre ike ^ e^rs^ ^-l^efthlt Salra

had been placed onto the board^f sh^ka*^® Minister » Elizabeth Kopp,
his wife had warned him to remove h . akar chi Trading Company, and that
indictments could be handed down mh name before Swiss and American
Kopp's resignation from her nos?' ensain 9 scandal resulted in Mrs.

jailed for their part in t-ho^i=„L Mohammed Shakarchi's two sons were

jailed for their part in ^ P ? St ' J Moha n»med Shakarchi's
still remain a mystery thfov^^ 1 " 9 scheme, but for reasons that
happened. *' expected indictment against Edmond Safra

hero 4 e

never

havoc from Wall Street i-<-> 4v? n Safra 's indictment would have create<

nee the Syrian-born to«.«®ku i head( 3 uar ters at United Nations Plaza
president of the merchant • h ® d • been for a P eriod of time the

a seat on the AmEx boar d^th^H dl ^ si< ? n of American Express, sharing
Safra had worked nine 1 Henr y Kissinger and Bialkin. Furthermore

SilSrH luokS ?„ C «?^L"io h . B ^ lkin l". ***”»* I«n-Contra figur,

the North-<?ernrrf if! .? 9 U P^ a corporate 3 et service used by members of
over the release throughout the secret negotiations with Tehran

over the release of American hostages in Lebanon.

Bialkin m w?f~v! e 5 9er v 0f w^ American Express, orchestrated by Kenneth

acquisition® on^v h a rb ?- n 9 er ° f bigger corporate mergers and

. ions on the horizon that would place control of some of
wnericas most prestigious and powerful corporate giants in the handsof
ADL linked shady characters.

To further his role in those corporate takeovers, Bialkin, in
January 1988 left Willkie Farr to join the world's largest, and perhaps
dirtiest law firm, Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

By its own published accounts, Skadden Arps today employs over one
thousand attorneys, over two thousand clerical and support personnel,
has offices throughout the United States, the Far East and Europe. In
1989, the firm billed its clients over $400 million in fees. Despite
these impressive financials, Skadden Arps has also been implicated in
the biggest white collar crimes of the decade, if not the century.

Skadden Arps specializes in mergers and acquissions. Attorney
Joseph Flom, a founding partner of the firm, is widely credited with

4- a 1 f at a 1 Tr n 1 1 it! _ _ j

u ir O.X1.UI, wxuciy Lxeaitea >

developing the technique alternately called "leveraged buy-out,"
"hostile takeover" or "corporate raid." Chief among Skadden Arps 1

~ — ^ ~ — ir ~ umway OJvauufcJU AXUb

Clients in the merger-mania that swept the American corporate sector
from 1985-88 was the brokerage house of Drexel Burnham Lambert, home oi
junk bond peddler Michael Milken. Milken and his close associate Ivan
Boesky cut a wide path through corporate America beginning in 1985
orchestrating a series of dramatic corporate hostile takeovers by '
floating high yielding "junk bonds” to generate the working capital foz
sudden stock purchases. The scheme was doomed to fail from the outset
at least from the standpoint of traditional investment criterion.
Companies like the Campeau Corporation, bought up a string of departmer
store chains throughout the United States and Canada - only to find tha
the combined cash flows of those captured firms did not produce enouah
®oney to even cover the interest payments on the loans taken out to mak

rr.

^situation turned worse f

W de ^i basis C of°inside n i d i SCOVere ^ r that the 1 ^!?' Milken and Boesky
V ,/ Se £t, e„ a bli„ g the“ e to ln 'S«io„

S& !*«*?“= profit.

r £3 ~fken ana ^exel were ex pense of the ° n *'*} e ^* r stoc k

jalke” ere all indicted hv +-K^« e « raideci com Pames. Boesky,

1 f the i * ^ G/ however , throuah^t-v^ U *?* Department of Justice.
5 °? e ^«nrf h «« 1 ® ad ^ n ? flna ^cial front 9 m^ th ? mechani sm of the "junk bonds"
i? ad ir f ?n?n f? invisible mechanism fn/f 11 fo f. th e old Lansky organization
fcack into the United States. At t^ r £ u nnelmg their offshore profits
the mid and late 1980s , an estimaf^ height of the corporate raids of
invested in junk bonds was nut , ! u d ^venty percent of all the cash
questioned where the firm not +-v^ ^ Drexe l Burnham Lambert. Nobody
not make their list of nrivii^ 7? ^oney from. And Drexel certainly did
The major buyers of tho n 9 e d investors known to the general public,
the Reliance Group a Riaiv* paper were known: Saul Steinberg of

junior partner of the ntitiu £ 1:L ? nt from the Willkie Farr days and a
Cornfeld; Carl Lindner* ^ !l . R °thschilds on the model of Bernie
long suspected of ties Vr. h fK Cl ^ G:Ln 1 nati/ Ohio based mortgage guarantor
another longtime Lansky associate!^ organization ' Victor Posner,

Skadden Arps^ho had !?.f llce 2 we ^ t off to federal prison, the attorneys at
best position to contrnf 1 ^ 111 ?? the takeover schemes and had been in the
withoS an iSdKtmeS ^ fl ° W ° f insider ^formation, walked away

so-called^char-ftaHfo^ in v tiad ^ een we ll insulated. In addition to his
AdviforJ % W ?K k ” lth , the League, Bialkin sat on the Legal

Exchange ° hS !« \v f the Board of Directors of the New York Stock
5S cSSitfcS A Cha - rman ° f the Cor P ora tion, Banking and Business

chaiSZ S Bar Associat i°n and had earlier been the

durt^S ?hf f noJL AB L - F ® d f ral - Regulation and Securities Committee. And
Reagan Administration, Bialkin was appointed to a

Presidential Panel assigned to study and recommend reforms in the entire
federal reguiatory system. Joining Bialkin on the commi??ee was C
Boyden Gray, who was then the General Counsel to Vice President Georae
Bush. Today, Gray is the General Counsel to the President Sray®s il
fhf? heir the R.J. R?y n ? lds Tobacco Company fortune - a fortune
that grew considerably following the company's merger with the National
Biscuit Company (Nabisco), a company with ties to the Anti-Defamation
League dating back to the League's founding, in 1988, RJR Nabisco
became the target of the biggest takeover war in the history of

Amer ^ a ;, Th f final Pf^ e £ ag on the stock purchases was over
$25 billion. Skadden Arps handled the transaction from honinni™ a.° ®
on behalf of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co. 7 beginning to en,

The potential profits for a well-placed inside trader with a

thf 1 * nd \ at Skadd ® n Ar P s w ® re almost incalculable. Over the course of
the fourteen months from when the initial secret neootiaHnL f

RJR Nabisco and Kravis began to when the final stonk ca ?^ 10nS l3 ® tween
RJR Stock values soared fLn a low of S41 « a Xak v“™
jump of nearly two hundred percent. P aiue of $108, a

Where did the profits land?

According to one U.S. intelligence expert on Israeli
very sizeable portion of the profits fronfthe RJR takeovel? as^il'as

Riklis f

/ r . major leveraged buy 0n+ - .. ( A

a*^?ffjcen, Ivan Boesky, e tai 1 Un b y Skadden

military shoJdown iith®?! into * war chl« S”!? 1 Bur,lh “-

''fas™" -Hh SSS! “ £ln “ C<>

I Ikadd" 9 ! ro " |0 ” l >a kinds°of^le ame P“"^Pa5lJ“Mm h iS,g^

^ r fected by Skadden Arps to mni« \ of leveraged buy-out schemes
suC h as narcotics trafficking JmJ t f ai9h H orward criminal enterprises
This self-described, Sharon sno ug 5 lln 9 and technology theft,
appendage of the North American M^" SOr ? d " Isra eli Mafia" was in fact an
period dominated by prominent' 1" 10 ?® 1 . Crime Syndicate - by this

League orbit, such as Kenneth n- r ®?halities in the Anti-Defamation
the Reichman brothers pHmnnri °ialkin, Edgar Bronfman, Meshulam Ri~

In the same way that p?v?- Safra ' and Henry A. Kissinger,
conduit to the hooliaan . S . was used b Y the ADL Lanskyites as a

by his ADL patrons in th er ? Vesc °/ Riklis was once again called upon
Sharon. Sharon had Si«2?J a ^ y 1970s to take U P the cause of General
nearly obsessively ambit himself out as a ruthless, corrupt and
pact with the ne^Ti h- 1 ?!^ s Personality, who would be willing to sign i
IsrLl. RikliS w hlm ou lf if it might mean his becoming the King of
ranch in the Mono n"* 6 ® baron ' s financial benefactor, purchasing him a

ss2 the <* ■ » iot «

___ time that Riklis established his ties with Sharon, the

-7, P°ir ce spy who had been condemned to death by the

h underground, had amassed a tremendous personal fortune and
corporate empire. His flagship company, Rapid America Corporation,
owned a string of high priced New York City office towers, as well as a
telecommunications equipment leasing company. One of Riklis'

lieutenants, Arieh Genger, became the go-between to General Sharon.

When Sharon became Defense Minister of Israel during the Likud Party
Prime Ministership of Menachim Begin in the late 1970s, he brought
Genger to Israel to serve as his deputy in charge of all foreign arms
imports and exports.

Sharon had been designated by the heirs of Meyer Lansky - if not by
Lansky himself - to oversee the Jewish syndicate's takeover of the
Israeli economy and its governing institutions.

Lansky knew that he needed a military man to pave the way for the
transformation of Israel into a syndicate homeland. In the late 1960s,
he had deployed one of his longtime associates, Joe "Doc" Stracher to
Israel. Stracher 's mission was to permanently settle in the Jewish
State and pave the way for Meyer Lansky himself to move to Israel.

Under the "Law of Return" any American Jew who moved to Israel could
immediately become an Israeli citizen. Stracher let it be known among
prominent rightwing Israeli politicians that Meyer Lansky was prepared
to personally invest $750 million into the Israeli economy - to build a
complex of resort hotels, gambling casinos and other similar enterprise
that would transform Israeli into a "new Riviera."

To Israel's good fortune, a group of patriots, apparently centered
in the Israeli Defense Force and its intelligence branch, resisted the
Lansky offer. They gathered up sufficient evidence that Lansky had

$dy

his

built „ p an or , &

i» Israeli citizenship. i n iS?!" 9 the "utioSaf cril ”

'^niky vas forced to leave Israel ?' short ly after hil ! s Y n dicate
t'greatened to withhold deliveJJ of f Th ® tricar, govern '
needed unless the Israeli rr^rtr 0t fjL 9hter lets th*Z r ni : had
extradition request. 9 r nment cooperated with *h ta » 1 desperately

Lansky's hopes of p 6rsonall th thm American

been niv^i !f as the smu ggling caoabi 1 • leve 5 a g e over larael lie in the

T^avS 1 ! 01 ^ to Isra el's war for fnHoi 1 ^ 88 ° f the JewlBh mob that had
syndicate had helped srauaale> d f Pend f nce * Leading members of the
fighting to establish a Jewish arms to the Jewish underground

Wax II. Without that syndicate • ln Palestine at the close of World

neVe in C i me lnt ° beil ?9* Y ® backin g / the State of Israel would have

Israel's of fshl^bankilla^neni^t 8 ^ Pinchas Sapir, the architect of
“Millionaires' Conference- ?® r T tlons ' sponsored what was called the
meeting was to solicit i mmc! 1 Jerusalem. The ostensible purpose of the
Israel's rapidly exDandir^h^w 8 from America's wealthiest Jews in
participants - almoft hl9h technol °gy industries. The list of

tale. The attendees 5 n f a . cron y of Meyer Lansky - tells the real

Lansky business fs^oct«ti Uded u L ° U;LS Boyar and Sam R °thberg, both known
mobster who b L . Henr Y Crown, another "former" Jewish
ciant MateT-?ai ^i YSd - a wa £ time scrap metal business into a corporate
IS | erv i- ces , Corporation; Max Fisher, a onetime leader of

• blt *° n ~ E f a Pur P 1 ? Ga ng that ran the bootlegged whiskey
concessions m Detroit, Michigan who later took over the United Fruit
company; Ray Wolfe, an associate of the Bronfman family, formerly known
as the Sam Bronfman Gang of Canada; Shaul Eisenberg, Israel's leading
gun runner and a top official of the Israeli intelligence service, the
Mossad; Raphael Recanati, head of the Israel Discount Bank and widely
thought to be the secret controller of the indigenous Israeli mafia;
and Phillip Klutznik, a top official of the ADL and a partner of
Eisenberg in the money laundering American Bank and Trust Company of New
York.

The scheme, which actually represented a foreign criminal move to
take over the Israeli economy, was cynically dubbed "Project
Independence . "

To centralize the "investments" into Israel that were pledged by the
participants in the meeting, a state sector company was setup in Israel
called the Israel Corporation. Banking operations for the Israel
Corporation were arranged through none other than Tibor Rosenbaum, the
Swiss-based head of the International Credit Bank and a one time chief
°f logistics for the Mossad. By the time of the Jerusalem
"Millionaires ' Club" meeting, Rosenbaum was already in bed with
Cornfeld, Lansky and Lansky's lieutenant Alvin Malnik, whose
Caribbean-based World Commerce Bank had already funneled $10 million in
Lansky profits into Rosenbaum's Swiss bank. The Malnik-Rosenbaum
interbank operation had also established a New York based affiliate in
the American Bank and Trust Company of top ADL official Phillip
KAutznik, one of the "Millionaires' Club" charter members..

the supervision Sf^Doc^StrLh* 16 Sheraton Hotel in
ix^eiing syndicate money into Israel 'o who immediately

^ dromon +- i u.. ti _ i •« . f and into th& t i^Lv e ^? io v® 6 ^ art y

ZjO

Yfiioue Party and Agudath Israel were ve^i ‘ B ?^ the Natioanl

htt movement of Menachim Begin. T er ^ c ^ ose with the riahtwin

_B^ e nt movement led by Rabbi Mena^W^ th ? A 9 udat h Israel

V£Z *2 Party and Aaudath To“L“ enachem Porush. R-vk 1

e very clos
sky money a

Settlements in the West Baiic“and Gaza IS?S d t he iUegal J^ish

occupied by Israel during the 1967^L £i^r£ Mlt0rie8 Biezed and

ZZmt bovwubuv wo. iwuauiim Begin. T.ancVu I 7 hhe rightwing

rTSTSl “ h i= h . »<>» 9 ht to SLSd ?h=°n?™? esis ln “ the

“SSTiii.ky »i:„ Toils ™! 1 ;"dui?, Day
jxp ? n.ion o^thj jewlsh sott l , m !„tf U !i 1 J h °“Lr»^v S S:2 n S:i s “45en“he

off.

Begin Likud government came in?o^ S in ^ he WeSt Bank and Gaza.

At the urgina of ? ? ower in 1911 ' the Plan took ort.

Sharon had resigned from the Israel Meshulam Riklis ' General Ariel

Knesset (Israel's parliament)^ n F ° rc ? for the

aoDointed Aori ml S- - 2 ln 19 Under Begin , Sharon was

the rapid exnan<*-irm ^ Minister, a position he immediately used to push
30 000 Jewf hart ° f ^ hS Jewish settlements. By 1981, an estimated

' Bv Sat sen relocated to the occupied territories,

won anoH To n ^ ® . ^<p n had been named Defense Minister. According to

~P-> t ? rae ^^. sources, Sharon during this period began

mhf Hu Wlth h tghlevel Soviet military officials in Cyprus.

Th purpose of the meetings was to negotiate the mass exodus of a
projected one and a half million Soviet Jews to Israel over the next
, ? de ' The bulk of those Jews, according to Sharon's plan (really an
elaboration of the original Lansky Plan) would be settled in the West
Bank and Gaza. The scheme would be dubbed "Landscam."

Landscam. would receive enthusiastic backing from not only the
Anti-Defamation League circles in the United States, but, also from some
leading Freemasonic circles in London, who carried on the Scottish Rite
tradition of sponsoring the cult of Zionism.

Beginning in the spring of 1982, on the eve of the Israeli invasion
of Lebanon, a series of secret meetings were held to get the Landscam
project off the ground.

The first of the meetings took place at the Negev Desert ranch of
Ariel Sharon, which had been purchased for him by ADL frontman Meshulam
Riklis. The meeting was attended by a rather extraordinary collectionof
people, according to eyewitness accounts and news reports:

* Sharon

* Henry A. Kissinger, by now the head of a private international
consulting firm, Kissinger Associates;

* Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, a Montreal attorney who attended
the meeting representing the Bronfman family interests. Bloomfield had
been a World War II operative of the super-secret British Special
Operations Executive (SOE), later becoming a partner in the
British-American-Canadian Corporation, a postwar front for British
Intelligence operations in North America. In the late 1950s, Bloomfield
setup the Permindex Corporation ("Permanent Industrial Expositions"),
which was accused of being involved in both the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy and the attempted assassination of French
President Charles DeGaulle. In addition to being the attorney for Edgar
Bronfman (he reportedly attended the Sharon ranch meeting as the
Bronfman representative), Bloomfield had been a close associate of

3t iona 1 Credit B * nk ' ® Tibor Rosenbaum and had been also lini^rt
'3? the Permindex board to Jewish mob lawyer Roy Cohn linked
^%irty- Rafi Eytan, a career Mossad officer and Knot ime
political ally of Ariel Sharon. Eytan held two posts within the Beain
government. He was the head of the Prime Minister's Office of Terror
Against Terror, an elite covert operations unit deployed to conduct
secret operations against Arab and Palestinian ’’enemies” of the State of
Israel* He was also the head of LAKAM, a little known espionage unit in
the Defense Ministry responsible for technical intelligence gathering.
LAKAM ran Israeli-Soviet spy Jonathan Jay Pollard.

* General Rehavam Ze'evi, a former Israeli Defense Force officer
who had quit the military in 1977 to become a ’’private"
counter-terrorist consultant to the government of Ecuador. This move to
South America was made on behalf of Ariel Sharon and the Israeli mafia.
Ze'evi was implicated in the 1980 military coup d'etat in Bolivia which
installed the infamous "Cocaine Colonels," under whose direction Bolivia
emerged as the world's leading coca producer and business partner of the
Medellin Cartel. By the time of the Sharon ranch meeting, Ze'evi had
been brought back officially into the Begin government as a consultant
to the Justice Ministry. This did not prevent him from joining with
Sharon in a widely publicized 1981 tour of Central America in which the
two former Israeli generals setup an elaborate network of arms
traffickers who would work in conjunction with the emerging Latin
American drug trafficking apparatus.

* Arieh Genger, the Vice President of Riklis' Rapid America

Corporation, who would soon become Sharon's deputy at the Israeli
Defense Ministry responsible for overseas arms sale. That post placed
Genger in liason with the arms traffickers installed all over the
Caribbean region by Ze'evi and Sharon. . ^ ^ ^ . . ,

* Eli Landau, an Israeli journalist and right-hand man to Ariel

Sharon^e^o nc j meeting took place on October 15, 1982 in the Chou f
Mountain region of Lebanon, a then occupied by Israeli military forces
under the command of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. Sharon, Lebanese
1111 — — Australian newspaper magnate Rupert

Lebanese government officials and wr
uIr~Dan'were in attendance. Dan would author a laudatory biography of

Falanae boss Camille Chamoun, Australian newspaper magnate Kupert
Murdoch several Israeli and Lebanese government officials and writer
nir Dan were in attendance. Dan would author a laudatory biography oi
Uir Dan were third meeting aimed at drawing in investors to the

JSdJciS ogiaSon “cSrref ^London on November 15. 1982 .. In addition

Lord Peter

f-n chamn and Henrv Kissinger, the attendees included:

CarfiJSSn by no?a partner with Kissinger in the Kissinger Associates

Harlech (Sir David Ormsby-Gore ) , the British ambassador in
firm; Lord Hariecn (bir uavx * ' , nd close allv of

T7 ii ;rL ( i an Amerv: British Zionist Sir Edmund Peer; ana

chie£ Bichol “ Elliot '

stil i. “ Be n i ° r w ^ietv a o£°front men and front organizations, the
participants in the series o^Ljndsea.

irSerSsfleft^? $ere P sS=m<=ally designated as Mosle* and Christian
9U '‘"y I tie end of the 1980s, the foundations had been laid for the final

jwindscamt the mass exodus of Soviet t
??•* ®*P ulsion of all the Arabs .

soviet Jews t '

- Arabs residing in tjf occup?l the
At this stage, another Anti-Defamatinn t Upied

to assume the pivotal role in the proa™™ L ? a 9 ue Lansky man R t a n ^ ,

ADL National Chairman Kenneth Bialkin 9 haH " ln much thesame wav P t > K d «- in
billions of dollars in crime revenues ! n °ir Been the rlpatrlatio^of
and real estate domains during the 1970s and ?QftA S * cor P°rate, bankinl
The point man was Edgar Bronfman tL ™ 1980s. anxmg

bootlegger Sam Bronfman and the heir - a?J!« n ?5u P J: ohibition Era
and several cousins - to the Seagrams whisklv brother Charles

family epitomized the syndicate success f«™£i! Pi S e ' The Bronfman
to riches to respectability. s for mulai from rags to rackets

Edgar Bronfman's grandfather Yechid
Bessarabia region of Romania in 1889 as « Canada from the
the Baron de Hirsch Fund, by then alreadi rt^o? 1 i ?f? nbur ® d servant to
Brith. At this time, top British zioni • allied Wlth the B'nai
Baron Alfred de Rothschild and Maurice de H i?sch had *° ses Montefiore,
the Hudson Bay Company, the British Colonial So . trUC \ a 2 eal w t th

gSL?jSl.ir^S2iS! 2 S“£-

Saskatchewan. It was here that Techiei r Bron£man n ianded. Manit ° ba a " d

. (t *® nam ® in y iddish literally means

liquorman ) to lan on the shores of North America immediately got
himself involved in the rackets, eventually opening up a string of whore
houses. When Canadian Prohibition began in 1915, Yechiel Bronfman's
whore houses became the illegal nightclubs, where bootlegged whiskey,
smuggled across the border from the United States, would be served.

Canada's experiment with Prohibition ended as the American
Prohibition was beginning, and Yechiel Bronfman and his sons, Abe and
Sam were already in a position to shift from purchasers to suppliers of
illegal whiskey - and narcotics. In 1916, Abe and Sam Bronfman had
parlayed the family's bootleg and prostitution revenues into the
ownership of the Pure Drug Company. The company, according to some
accounts, began importing narcotics from the Far East into Canada. It
fe is certain that the production facilities of the Pure Drug Company begar
w churning out cheap whiskey to flood the American markets once
Prohibition began in the United States. The

Bronfmans were the principle suppliers of the Meyer Lansky National
Crime Syndicate throughout the Prohibition period. The family amassed t
fortune selling "chickencock" - the name given to their whiskey.
According to U.S. government records, between 1920 and 1930, over 34,00<
Americans died of alcohol poisoning drinking the Bronfman brew.

When Canadian police moved against the "Bronfman Gang" in 1926,
Yechiel ' s four sons set up the Atlas Shipping Company to ship their
whiskey to the Caribbean where it was transferred to boats owned by th<
Reinfeld Syndicate the "Jewish Navy" and other Lansky syndicate rum
runners .

At the close of Prohibition, Sam Bronfman negotiated a deal with th<
u*S. Treasury Department to pay several million dollars in back taxes -
• miniscule portion of the illegal profits the family derived from the
Prohibition whiskey and drug running. The purpose of the payment was t<
«-lear the decks for the Bronfman family's overnite transformation into

Z-3

'sa» £ Bron£man was^adfeHprLident^f v ■

«I S“-S h . f

’B.'sjsr x*

|m ?;““^ on thrSro,S! s »t-‘ eli je ”^»'Rl“b!mi“S„* st Ssp 5 iS d

^ rfnL int-n a "iftrT^ <Br ? n ^ n sons had transformed their bootleg
T? bus f ness - Seagrams Distillers of Canada.

In tb ® . tbe ^ am ily would move, by marriage, into the

very center of the Zionist Establishment of North America. Edgar
Bronfman married Ann Loeb and immediately became attached to the Loeb
Rhodes interests of Wall Street. Phyllis Bronfman married Jean Lambert
and suddenly the Bronfmans were in the extended Rothschild family.

Baron Lambert was part of the Belgian branch of the Rothschild clan. The
New York investment house of Drexel Burnham Lambert, that would play
such a pivotal role in Kenneth Bialkin's later corporate takeover
schemes, were absorbed into the Bronfman orbit.

Even while the Bronfman family pursued a steady march from rags to
rackets to riches to respectability, some members of the core family
could not wholly abandon the old syndicate ties.

In 1972, the Montreal Crime Commission issued a report identifying
Edgar Bronfman's nephew Mitchell Bronfman as a crime partner of one of
Montreal's leading gangsters, Willie Obront. According to the report,
[Mitchell Bronfman's links to Obront "extends into illegal activities in
which they have mutually or jointly indulged . . . the special kinds of
favors they did for each other and the resulting advantages of each in
the fields of loan sharking, gambling, illegal betting, securities, tax
evasion and corruption." In the mid-1970s, Obront and another Mitchell
Bronfman cronie, Sam Rosen, were both jailed for drug money laundering.
One joint venture of Obront and Bronfman, the North Miami nightclub
Pagoda North, was identified by American law enforcement authorities as
a syndicate hangout frequented by Vito Genovese, the New York City Mafia
boss .

Edgar Bronfman, the president of the World Jewish Congress, the
Honorary Vice Chairman of the Anti-Defamation League and the Chairman

the ADL's key fundraising arm, the Northeast Appeal, was another major
beneficiary of the Skadden Arps law firms expertise in corporate
takeovers .

In the mid-1980s, Irving Shapiro, the Chairman of the Board of the
DuPont Chemical Corporation, one of America's oldest and largest
industrial concerns, retired from his corporate post to become a partner
in Skadden Arps. Shortly after his arrival at the law firm, Edgar
Bronfman's Seagrams Corporation began buying up stock in the DuPont
company, eventually taking over a controlling interest. Shapiro, who
worked closely with Bronfman during his tenure as President of the
Business Roundtable, was reportedly a key inside player in the Bronfman
takeover of DuPont.

Parenthetically, after his shift from DuPont to Skadden Arps, Irving
Shapiro helped recruit his son Isaac to the firm as well. Isaac brought

1 :vK ;jbh3t tivit:

h im the lions share of Japanese real estate Investors in the Unlt-eH

Kaon hie nl anfe =-H V. i e. i . 1 '~ n * 1 UIUteQ

a i'J, who had been his clients at his previous firm, the Blueblood
Milbank, Hadley, Tweed and McCoy.

Armed with a string of prestigious titles as a leading Zionist
philanthropist and corporate billionaire, Edgar Bronfman launched a
systematic effort in the mid-1980s to implement Meyer Lansky's second
dream - the syndicate takeover of Israel.

If there was a single official of the ADL equipped to convince the
Soviet government to open the floodgates of Jewish emigration and to
insure that the Russian Jews landed in Israel, it was Edgar Bronfman.

Through his Seagrams distributorships, Edgar and his brother Charles
had cultivated a cozy relationship with some of the most powerful
figures in the Communist world, beginning with East German Communist
Party chief Erich Honnecker. Through the West German branch of
Seagrams, the Bronfmans had arranged to supply the East German Communist
Party with unlimited quantities of Seagrams liquors, which were doled
out free of charge to the most senior ranking members of the party. By
1986, a Bronfman emmisary in East Berlin had established close ties with
Klaus Gysi, the East German Minister of Religious Affairs and the father
of Honnecker's successor as head of the the Communist Party (SED),

Gregor Gysi. The Gysis are Jewish.

In 1988, Edgar Bronfman himself traveled to East Berlin to meet with
Honnecker and East German Communist Party official Herman Axen. During
that visit Bronfman pledged that he would arrange a state visit for
Honnecker to Washington, D.C. A year later, on the eve of Honnecker's
ouster and the overthrow of the communist dictatorship in East Germany,
Bronfman received the highest civilian award given by the state, the
"Peoples Friendship Medal in Gold."

With the Cold War rapidly coming to a close following the Reykjavik
summit meeting between Soviet leader Gorbachov and American President
Reagan in November 1986, Bronfman began an ambitious diplomatic drive on
Moscow, paralleling his successful courting of the East Germans.

On January 23, 1989, according to a report published by syndicated
columnists Evans and Novak, Edgar Bronfman held a secret meeting at his
New York City penthouse to plan out the Soviet Jewish exodus. In
attendance at the session was Dwayne Andreas, the chairman of the grain
cartel Archer Daniels Midland who was identified in the Wall Street
Journal as Gorbachov's "closest pal" in the West. Bronfman's plan was
simples in return for assurances that the United States would supply
urgently needed grain shipments to the Soviet Union, Moscow would allow
Soviet Jews to move to Israel. To assure that the Soviet Jews would

arrive in the West and then either travel to the United States or remain
in Europe, Bronfman's World Jewish Congress had already launched a
vicious slander campaign against Austrian President Kurt Waldheim
branding him as a wartime Nazi collaborators who had participated in the
extermination of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Bronfman's campaign was
aided by forged documents allegedly provided by the Soviet KGB and other
Soviet Bloc secret police agencies. The scandal led to a serious rift
in American-Austrian relations. As the result, Austria, which had
previously been the major transit point for Soviet Jews fleeina to the
We f t ' ® hu £ to Soviet Jewish emigre. Alternative routes were^ 6
established through Hungary and Poland - with the caveat that the Soviet

ws would only be allowed
Evans and Novak denounced thf I rat ? to Israel *
trade "Jews for grain.” The^aJsh^orrf,^ ,® cheme as a cynical effort to
least. As the heir to the "Bronfman°r dS did not bother Bronfman in the
worse. Besides, the ADL Ln reaf^/K k ±S famil y had been called
longstanding family debt to Mever^fn £ hat h ® was personally repaying a
grand dream of the crime ^ La ? S , ky ' and was fulfilling the second

B czar: the takeover of Israel.